Deaths of Cinema Introduction

Recent claims about the death of cinema have tended to focus on the introduction of digitaltechnologies in practices of cinematic production, distribution, and exhibition. (5)

…associated with technological change: from the introduction of sound to developments in color to the emergence of television to the proliferation of video and digital technologies, each instance of media change has been the occasion of a new (or the same old) cinematic “death.”

While the development of digital technologies has been an occasion for rethinking medium-specific definitions of cinema, it has also prompted another set of abstract responses to cinematic death, (perhaps most simply described in terms of the simultaneous mourning and celebration of cinematic change). (6)

Although cinematic death has been most often described in terms of replacement and obsolescence, these papers suggest the dynamic relationships that continue to exist between old and new media forms. (8)

it is evident that just as the cinema has transformed, so too must film studies. We hope that the essays in this issue suggest some of the approaches by which our discipline may continue to revitalizeand reinvigorate itself; indeed, while the cinema may experience any number of deaths, each of these passings actually marks a new avenue of investigation—a new set of lively discourses—for our ever changing field. (8)